STIMULUS WATCH: Obama announces job-counting rules

WASHINGTON — Attention workers: If you’re getting federal stimulus money, stand up and prepare to be counted. And no cheating.

The Obama administration issued its long-awaited rules for tallying jobs Monday and warned that local politicians trying to inflate their numbers would surely be caught.

As part of the $787 billion stimulus law, governors, mayors and contractors must begin reporting job numbers to the federal government in October. The data collected could provide the most accurate count of workers employed by stimulus money, a number that is expected to be far more precise than the murky and unverifiable promise that 3.5 million jobs will be created by the end of next year.

But for months, there has been confusion over what the rules would be. What’s a created job? A saved job? Could a construction worker be counted twice if he worked two part-time contracts? On highway jobs, do you count just the laborers, or also the extra wait staff at the nearby lunch spot?

Under the rules released Monday, the White House told governors, mayors and contractors to keep it simple.

“Just count the people being paid out of Recovery Act dollars,” said Rob Nabors, deputy director at the White House budget office.

To avoid double-counting, a job means a full-time, full-year job. So a student working a 9-to-5 job for his three-month summer vacation will be counted as one-fourth of a job. The part-time teacher who works all year is half a job. And the full-time highway contractor who works all year is one job.

As the figures are released every three months, the data will represent the closest to a stimulus head count as any information available in real time. The number is expected to fall well short of the 3.5 million mark. That’s because there’s no way to reliably tally jobs created by Obama’s $288 billion tax cuts. And the count will not include jobs created by the ripple effect of business spending.

The White House will issue those estimates based on the head count.

“This whole thing is tricky. I’m not going to pretend it’s not,” Nabors said. “This whole effort is virtually unprecedented.”

If the numbers are to be reliable, however, states, cities and contractors must report honestly. White House officials know there are political and financial incentive to cheat: Contractors can use job-creation data as a public relations ploy. Local politicians can turn job numbers into campaign literature. And states that use the money well could be in line to get more of it.

In the absence of these rules, some states have announced jobs based on out-of-date formulas, leading to implausible estimates. Ohio officials, for instance, have estimated that a $20 million bridge construction project will create or save 10,500 jobs.

Nabors said officials will analyze the data for signs of inflation.

“If governors or mayors or contractors make up numbers, it’s not going to take long for that to come to light,” he said.

Since Obama signed the stimulus bill, the nation has shed more than 1.6 million jobs. The president says the stimulus has created or saved 150,000 jobs, but White House advisers acknowledge the estimate is based on a formula that was never intended to count jobs.

On the Net:

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: www.recovery.gov